The Writing Center as Cultural and Interdisciplinary Contact Zone

By: Randall W. Monty

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Synopsis: Writing centers are complex. They are places of scholarly work, spaces of interdisciplinary interaction, and programs of service, among other things. With this complexity in mind, this book theorizes writing center studies as a function of its own rhetorical and discursive practices. In other words, the things we do and make define who we are and what we value. Through a comprehensive methodological framework grounded in critical discourse analysis, this book takes a closer look at prominent writing center discourses by temporarily shifting attention away from the stakeholders, work, locations, and scholarship of the discipline, and onto things--the artifacts and networks that make up the discipline. Through this approach, we can see the ways the discipline reinforces, challenges, reproduces, and subverts structures of institutional power. As a result, writing center studies can be seen a vast ecosystem of interconnectivity and intertextuality.